Researcher calls for better dental care in northern Sask.

A teacher at the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Dentistry is hoping his research can help craft better policies to improve dental care in Saskatchewan’s northern and remote communities.

Dr. Keith Da Silva took up a position as an assistant professor at the U of S in July and had the opportunity to spend a chunk of this winter touring communities in the north.

“People living south of a certain point, in the major cities, definitely have more than those who live in northern communities. And that’s aside from just dental care, but in resources in general,” he said of his observations.

Da Silva said food security and access to facilities and care providers pose challenges to improving dental outcomes. He added that traditional approaches to things like promoting better oral hygiene sometimes miss the mark in communities where scarcity and difficult social conditions are a reality.

“When you really look at, sometimes, the poverty or the level of resources that people have available to them, those messages really aren’t as appropriate where we need to be kind of working on bigger issues,” he said.

While he said better overall conditions would certainly improve dental health in Saskatchewan’s northern populations, he noted there are smaller steps that can also be taken, such as making materials available in the Indigenous languages many people use.

“We typically see English and French on many advertisements related to oral health, but more appropriate messaging in the words of the people we’re trying to deal with tends to have more effect and more resonance with them,” Da Silva said.

He said simply making more space available for families could also help improve the connection between caregivers and patients.

“Typically when we bring children into the back room, the families don’t come back, or maybe only one parent does, whereas in Indigenous cultures the whole family and everyone in the family has an equal role,” he said.

In the longer term, he said getting more northerners trained as dentists and dental hygienists could be part of the solution to the long travel times many people face when seeking care for their teeth.

“So they can go back and help their communities because they often know their needs a lot better,” he said.

Da Silva stressed that solutions won’t come from just having academics and policy-makers meeting in the south, but will need Indigenous community leaders to be at the table from the beginning.

“We’re never going to understand, really, what the appropriate solutions are if we’re not working with them to make those solutions come together,” he said.